What’s Going Viral: Is it a Rabbit or a Bird?

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The internet loves a good optical illusion! We had it with the blue vs gold dress and the pink vs grey shoes. Now there’s a new video going viral, which involves a bird – or is it a rabbit? A video was shared on Twitter, of an animal enjoying a head scratch. But people couldn’t tell if it was a rabbit or a bird.

Within half an hour, the video racked up over 7,000 retweets and nearly 30,000 likes.

The video’s trickery is similar to a the duck-rabbit illusion first published in a German magazine in 1892, then used by Joseph Jastrow in 1899 in his research on perception. Optical illusions that display two different things depending on how you look at them are known as ambiguous images or reversible figures – like that drawn picture of either an old women, or a young women.

In the case of this viral video, the animal appears to be a bird due to the positioning of the supposed “ears” of the “rabbit.” Rabbits’ ears are on the sides of their heads, not one behind the other. The “ears” also don’t appear to be fuzzy, indicating that the animal is actually a raven or crow.

So here’s the video – what did you see first?

Quoth the Raven ‘awwww yissss’

 


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